Boss is owned and operated by Kistek LLC, a cloud systems consultancy located in San Diego, California. Boss was created by Chris Hiestand, who has heavily used open source software since ~1998 and has been actively contributing to open source projects since ~2008. All of those contributions have been individually small, in part, because it has not been easy to get paid for open source work.
Contribution to open source has always been important to my work. It has always seemed unfair to me that my employers and I would benefit so much from open source software, usually with nothing in return. Once as an employee I pushed for meager monetary contributions to open source projects we used deeply, and were wholly dependent on. I got no support from management whose attitude was "Why buy the cow when the milk is free?" But that same employer would drop thousands of dollars on enterprise software that was often riddled with opaque, productivity killing, bugs. Whenever I had the opportunity I would contribute back to the OSS community, on and off company time, via patch/pull request, bug report, via mailing list, or stack overflow.
I love that contributions make you feel like part of a like-minded community, and I've contributed to many over the years. They range from the file magic directory to google cloud libraries to Concourse CI resources. My favorite contributions are the small ones I made to kubernetes because I was so excited about the project, and a working, but unmerged, one line Linux Kernel patch my friends and I made at a Debian bug squashing party.
For your average software engineer, the best thing about open source is the sheer volume enabling our work. There are regularly exciting new open source projects, along with dependable old legacy open source projects. But one of the worst things about OSS is when something elegantly solves your problem, except for one bug or one missing feature. The maintainers usually have insufficient resources to handle it in a timely manner. And often this adds to increased business costs.
There are already some great ways to contribute to open source projects you love via e.g. monthly payments. But there was no seamless way to contribute money to project-specific bugs or feature requests. My hope is that by allowing businesses and people to contribute towards specific, short-term goals, boss will enable a whole new class of untapped open source contributions. OSS contributions don't have to be a case of "buying the cow" because some prefer to simply buy better milk. The benefits go to those creating and those earning bounties, and because it's OSS, everyone else too.
Whether you represent a business looking to shorten time-to-market by smoothing the project runway, or an open source contributor justly wanting to get paid for your time spent working, or otherwise, I hope boss can make OSS better for you.